An important factor in the success of a business is its ability to react to organizational changes within the business. These changes are usually handled through a change management process. Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as adding a new person or modifying a program. However, today's change management systems do not cover Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and are focused on singular programs. As organizations adopt SOA, there is a need to define and put in place an organizational change management process.
In an SOA environment, there is a need to mitigate risk with appropriate oversight and control between the different parties involved due to higher levels of collaboration and resource sharing. In SOA, there is a need to increase reuse and buy-in for shared services. Therefore, the change management process needs to ensure that the SOA governance capabilities addressing shared services are spanning across multiple groups within the enterprise and are accepted by all the groups. This acceptance will allow the organization to realize greater benefits from their SOA deployment and adoption. Current change management systems are “static” in that they are focused on the initial creation and deployment of a change within the enterprise. Furthermore, current change management systems do not provide any lifecycle management processes to manage the change once it's been deployed.